"I was ultimately responsible for the game we released and take full responsibility for the quality of the result," says chief creative officer Rob Pardo in wake of criticism.

Blizzard chief creative officer Rob Pardo has taken to Diablo III's forums to publicly defended former game director Jay Wilson, who announced his departure from the Diablo III development team last week.

Wilson took to the forums to say goodbye after working on Diablo III for seven years, as he's now moving on to an unannounced project at Blizzard. The farewell discussions were quickly overtaken by many players who felt Blizzard has not done enough with their latest dungeon crawler, which was finally released in 2012 after years of development.

While Pardo is "very proud" of Diablo III, which scored a very respectable 8.5 from GameSpot last year, he quickly concedes that the team at Blizzard have plenty more to do with the game. "I have enjoyed the game and played for many, many nights with friends and family. I’m not, however, going to use that as an excuse. The Diablo community deserves an even better game from Blizzard and we are committed to improving it."

"We have a talented team in place and have no intention of stopping work on Diablo III until it is the best game in the franchise."

Pardo also defended Wilson and said he has a great career ahead of him at Blizzard, "I hired Jay to head up the Diablo project and had the pleasure of getting to work with him, both in building the team and designing the game. He has great design instincts and has added so much to the franchise."

"I’ve worked with many, many designers at Blizzard and Jay is one of the best. He has a great career at Blizzard ahead of him and I guarantee that you will enjoy Jay’s game designs in future Blizzard games."

In summary, Pardo said that "blame" for Diablo III should be aimed directly at him instead of other people at Blizzard. "If you love Diablo as much as we do, then please continue to let us know how you feel we can improve the game. If you still feel the need to dish out blame, then I would prefer you direct it at me."

"I was the executive producer on the project; I hired Jay and I gave him advice and direction throughout the development process. I was ultimately responsible for the game we released and take full responsibility for the quality of the result."

it's not rob parko's fault, it's activision's fault, every since activision merged with blizzard, blizzard have sucked badly. stupid real world auction house and always online DRM, that is all activisions fault.

Blizzard with Diablo 3 ah and rmah has distorted the basic nature of the looting system. and the runic skills system is too much free and fails to render a character more "unique".

On the other hand, Torchlight 2, even if is a much better game that Diablo 3 for most aspects, totally lacks in the Charisma of the classes and of the enemies. Everything else is perfect. I personally don't like too much my char, too cartoonish in the animations and in the aesthetics.

"We have a talented team in place and have no intention of stopping work
on Diablo III until it is the best game in the franchise." yeah lol, the only way that will ever happen is if they find every copy of D1 and D2 and destroy them LMAO!!

Diablo 3 - One of those games I gave up on, after being disconnected numerous times. When actually playing the game, I found it to be a stab in the face from Blizzard. 10 years we waited for this title... what a let down.

an Overrated Game, Story is Too short, Nothing drive player continue to play, Online Is the most pain in the ass! No Offline Game! No Lobby Town where by Player Can Gathering, look at each other gear and pvp!! Concept is Good, But Get Bored Fast!!

Getting cut off from the internet happens way more frequently than you think it does. Also there are situations where people do not have access to stable good internet, or internet at all. Like sometimes some college campus' have crappy overcrowded networks that are prone to disconnects. My friends disconnect all the time in DOTA.

A game, which can be played in single player should ALWAYS have an offline mode, as well as allowing the user to seemlessly play even if they disconnect from the servers. At the very least they should have made the system like older titles where you had official play where you HAD to play on the server, and non-official play where you could play offline.

You oversimplify the problem by attributing things to piracy, and TBH I think you are projecting to me that you pirate games yourself judging by your statements.

Hi Blizzard great game, Im sure you are working on more game content than what we could ever dream of. BUT !!!

1. single-player offline is a requirement, not an option

1. single-player offline is a requirement, not an option

1. single-player offline is a requirement, not an option

1. single-player offline is a requirement, not an option

That is the massive problem. That could have been sorted with a locked offline character and a locked online character.

*World's gaming problem in 2004 was getting a strong enough pc to play the games.

*World's gaming problem in 2012 ( Future) Is having a fast enough internet connection to stop lag from latency ( with no LAN ever)

This is retarded if you live in South Africa. Any game ever played in SA without a dedicated server here is a instant latency of +200ms, because we have to connect a game in the UK. ( Dota 2, WOW, D3, AC3, any game)

Also real money auction house worked with WOW because it was a new game, D3 isn't and already had some standerds that need to be attended to.

Yes, fire the whole team. And no, it's not harsh. It happens all the time in the game industry. If they're skilled enough to create D3, they'll be able to get jobs elsewhere. As a programmer, I know from experience that it's better to scrap a program and start over from scratch than to make a thousand fixes to an old program and have it not work properly. Get rid of the D3 team, bring back the D2 team, and fill in any new spots with new people that didn't work on D3. The D3 team followed the vision of the morons at the top, and they are used to working with that vision. That vision must disappear completely. D3 did a 180 turn away from fun, and it will take a 180 turn away from D3 to bring the fun back. Blizzard needs to bring back the original D2 team, give them full funding, let them bring back the fun game franchise we all remember, and keep their greedy noses out of the development process. No subscription fees. No more pay-to play stuff like the RMAH as necessary to reach the highest levels of the game. No required always-on internet connections. And single-player offline is a requirement, not an option.

For feks sakes! as Agnes Brown would say! By the time the game was done Diablo himself could have risen from his grave and obliterate humanity. And the online requirement is just the sunday on the cake. But now, you wont be fekin changing that for sure aren't you?

There is a few nice little games that's called torchlight and torchlight 2, maybe you could talk to them and really see how Diablo 3 should have been done. They are not perfect but the devs did not decide to screw their fanbase...

I hate it when people try to use trolls to invalidate the arguments of people with legitimate grievances. Just ignore most of that 106 page thread and listen to the people who actually tell you what's wrong instead of trolling. Trolls are everywhere, ignoring criticism because of trolls would be like not breathing because there's dust particles in the air, loud, angry dust particles. There's probably hundreds of thread with constructive criticism and the only one they have time to respond to is a flame war so they can say "tsk, tsk"

I dont get why people find it suprising that the games wasn't as expected... Blizzard is not the company it used to be when it released starcraft, warcraft 3 and diablo 2 ;complaining to a changed company won't get you nowhere

@aero_kinetic It's a pretty shabtastic game. It's story is trite, it's dialogue is pathetic and hardly ever reaches two dimensionality, the most exciting parts of Diablo III were the cinematics, which were damn near perfect and were exquisite to behold, but then they inevitably came to an end and we were thrust back into the steaming pile of repetitive game play in a world of bad design decisions. Unfortunately, even amazing cinematics get boring enough to skip, and quickly, leaving just a long, boring, witless blunderfest that reeks of The Phantom Menace and the Curse of the Yes Men.

Aero, just because it's your opinion that the game is good doesn't mean it actually is. It's choice of atmosphere alone was a foolish enough decision as it robbed the game of the charm that tied together it's predecessors so well. It tried to present cheap, poorly thought out gothic elements in it's paltry, childish story, all of it jammed together in a series of dire, would-be exciting settings. The cinematic game play approach was yet another foolish decision. Instead of giving us a true dungeon crawler, we were forced into a series of episodes that all played out exactly the same, only the climax never arrived! The bosses were all dirt easy compared to the incredible amount of SSJ elite mobs who ended up being the reason for farming, rather than the should-have-been-awesome bosses we got, who were mostly just laughable MMO boss rip offs with interesting skins.

The Diablo 3 team attacked the Diablo franchise and hacked away far too many necessities in their attempt to be designer hipsters, making something entirely original, yet better than the original series it was supposed to be a part of. Instead, we have the awkward outsider that almost only gets mentioned when it's being flamed. This game has failed, the masses of spoken, the paid review sites have as well, and now we're left with further lame hipster promises about making D3 the best game in the series...but, I doubt they're going to be remaking this shit ball from scratch, so it's just more smoke being blown to cover their failhard asses.

Goodbye Blizzard of olde, we'll remember you long after Activision has finished raping your legacy q_q

@intothekey This guy is 100% correct. Path of Exile is far closer to what should have followed D2 then the malodorous mass of fail we were handed. It's 100% free, too! Great, huge, bad ass game for FREE, that puts D3 to shame...more so than it had been wallowing in already, if you can believe that :P

@VarietyMage that wouldn't change anything, this is all activisions doing, activision dictated what they wanted with the game, the developers are not at fault here. heck the only reason why blizzard brought out diablo 3 in the first place is because activision told them to.

@Bradjune80 Stop blaming people for making a bad game from your point of view, and move on. The game is already way better than it was released. Only major thing that they could get rid off would be RM-/AH.

@TigusVidiks ? That is entirely your own failing. The game is terribad, but the stat system was fairly self explanatory, not to mention having every resource Google can throw at you to learn about the game, to study or copy builds, to follow guides that lead to a super awesome character or making leveling easier / faster, etc...

@TigusVidiks How odd, I feel the exact opposite. I actually really enjoy not having to fret over distributing my stats improperly. Maybe I'm just crazy, but it's gotten to the point where games like Torchlight 2 legitimately freak me out due to not knowing where I should put my stat points.

@immadbro It's irrelevant. The Diablo brand that been destroyed by the stupidity of their cloud game design, the poor game system, the downgrading of the game system from Diablo 2 standards, and the lack of respect shown to the gaming community by the Diablo development staff. It will take a new game made by a new staff with Diablo 2 in mind to redeem Blizzard, if they are redeemable at all. Personally, I doubt another Diablo will ever be released. Blizzard is greedy, and their eyes are currently set on MMOs (WOW2 and Titan, whatever that will end up being).

@geysiki@Jackmac36If adding numbers to stats prevents a simple shallow game full of clones, perhaps it time we rethink games.I feel like I have plenty of choice and variation in D3 with skills and stats in items.On the other hand I could just be crazy and totally wrong--but at least Blizzard tried to mix things up.